City Survival: When Bugging Out Isn’t an Option

Every survival-minded individual worth their
salt has a plan in place for a SHTF situation. These plans often involve
heading out of the city where competition for resources will be greatly
reduced. Maybe you have caches hidden in the woods with supplies you’ll need,
or the perfect, abandoned cabin waiting for you.

But sometimes leaving isn’t an option. If the
streets are flooded or completely congested with traffic and abandoned
vehicles, bugging out is a pipe dream. Depending on what survival situation you’re
presented with, you may not even be able to exit your home, let alone travel
dozens of miles to your predetermined safe house. So, if going out and living
off of the land until the danger passes isn’t a viable choice, you’ll have to
make due and survive in your city.

Review Your Options

First and foremost, as with any survival
situation, you have to take stock of what you’ve got on hand and review the
situation itself. While a lot of preppers have months of food, water, and
medical supplies on hand, not all survival-minded individuals have made such
preparations. For those of us who have plans that revolve around leaving the
city, it is important to catalogue all useful items in our homes.

Before anything else, go to your fridge. If
the power is no longer functioning, you should eat as much of the perishable
food in your refrigerator as you can handle. If you happen to have ice cream in
the freezer, enjoy it, because who knows when, or if, your power will kick back
on. Once you’ve torn through your perishables, go through all of your canned
and dry goods to take stock and make a rationing plan, just in case you have to
be in it for the long haul.

Next, cannibalize your meticulously packed bug-out bag. Though it may be
packed with the outdoors in mind, it will still contain plenty of useful items
that will increase your chances of survival. Mylar blankets can be placed on
the roof to signal that you’re inside and in need of rescue, and your portable
water filter will become invaluable once you exhaust all of the potable water
in the back of the toilet tank. A first-aid kit will have topical antibiotics,
painkillers, and bandages that you’ll find useful down the road.

The rules for staying put and traveling with a
chronic illness are quite a bit different. In a survival situation you don’t
have the luxury of relying on the system to take care of you. Insurance becomes
null, and the chances that you’ll be able to schedule a medical evacuation in
an emergency are basically zero. Without
access to medical professionals to renew prescriptions, you’ll have to make
some quick decisions. Locate all of your medicine and make sure it is all
accounted for, making a note of just how long you have before you’ll have to
venture out to raid a pharmacy. Realistically, you’ll want to do this quickly
if your medicine supply won’t last long, as in a survival situation medicine is
one of the first things that will be targeted for looting.

Staying Put

If you’ve got the time and money, making some
investments into city survival before things turn sour is a good idea. The
immediate benefit of staying put, is that you’ll have access to all of your
books, both for reference on survival tactics, and to stymie the boredom that
comes with staying in one place for too long. Beyond just stocking your pantry
with MREs and other shelf-stable foods, there is a lot you can do to make your
survival not only easier, but a bit more comfortable as well.

The idea behind any survival situation is to get as close to self-sufficiency as
you possibly can. Alternative energy sources like solar and wind power are
becoming more viable every year, as the technology becomes more advanced and
more affordable at the same time. Cultivating a garden, either indoors or out,
is a great way to ensure that your food supply stays stable in the coming weeks
or months. Having a rain barrel outside your home can help to maintain fresh
water for drinking, and you can also modify
your roof to collect morning dew.

Now, while solar panels and windmills do
generate power, if it is overcast or the air is still, their effectiveness
drops significantly. To counter this, consider purchasing and installing a
couple of home batteries. Like the windmills
and solar panels that provide them power to store, home batteries have become
surprisingly affordable in the last few years, and their capacity has increased
significantly as well.

Survival in the Streets

Once you’ve got your home outfitted for the
long-term, you’ll have to start thinking about what you’ll need to do when your
supplies run out. Developing a plan for extended survival is often necessary,
as staying cooped up in your home will only last so long. Once the hubbub has
died down a little in your city, you may even be able to enact your original
SHTF plan.

If you plan on heading out of your home on
foot, reassemble your bug-out bag, adding additional kit that is more fitting
for an urban environment. Swap out your entrenching tool for a pry bar, which
will make acquiring supplies much easier. The need for self-defense tools is
greatly increased in urban settings, so consider switching out snare wire for
caltrops in case you need to make a speedy exit, and bring a reliable,
high-caliber revolver. In survival situations, revolvers can be superior to
semi-automatic pistols as they are less likely to jam and require less
maintenance overall. The trade-off is that the capacity for ammunition is
greatly decreased, but hopefully you won’t have to actually use your revolver
at all.

If you’ve exhausted all of the easily
obtainable supplies in your city, you may be forced to head to another, or out
into the woods. If this is the case, consider outfitting a mobile-home or
towing camper as a survival-minded vehicle. If your journey is particularly
long, this will make your survival that much easier by having a maintained
collection of survival necessities at hand. There are many affordable RV’s that can be
purchased for less than $15,000, or if you prefer a more DIY approach to
survival, converting a trailer into a suitable camper is easy and inexpensive as well.

Conclusion

So, if the world comes crumbling around you,
and you don’t have the option to leave your home immediately, don’t worry. With
a little extra preparation, you’ll not only survive in a city, but thrive! It
isn’t as easy to be self-sufficient in an urban landscape, but it isn’t
impossible either. Just know that it won’t be forever, and that eventually you
can head out into the woods and rely on your bushcraft and survival knowledge,
but until then, enjoy your comfortable bed!

Author Bio:

Ross Cowan is a freelance writer who lives in Idaho. He enjoys white-water rafting, long camping trips with his partner and dog, and is an avid hiker. Follow Ross on his Twitter @RossCowanWrites.